Call of the Wild

The myths of the romanticized West die hard, a fact that was making a tough job even tougher last week for a 100-man posse in three states. The searchers were engaged in an all too familiar chore: hunting down Claude Dallas, 36, a self-styled "mountain man" who cold-bloodedly killed two game wardens in January 1981. After the slayings, Dallas eluded similar posses in the bleak, high desert country near the Oregon-Idaho-Nevada border for 16 months before he was wounded and caught in April 1982. On Easter Sunday, Dallas cut his way through two fences at the Idaho State Correctional Institution near Boise and vanished once again in his former haunts.

Bloodhounds working from the scent of a baseball cap found near the prison traced Dallas as far as the Paradise Hill Bar near Winnemucca, Nev., close to the mobile home where he had been captured four years ago. To some locals, Dallas embodied all the old gunslinger's heroics. He had proved that he was a faster draw than the wardens, who, in this view, had no business invading his mountain camp to find out whether he was poaching game, a God-given right in the wilderness. Never mind that Dallas had pumped shots into the heads of both victims as they lay wounded on the ground. He managed to persuade a jury that he was guilty only of manslaughter.

Sheriff Vaughn Killeen, leading the manhunt from a Boise command center, was unimpressed by Dallas' folk-hero image, garnished by two books and likely to be embellished in a movie that had been planned before his escape. Scoffed the sheriff: "The only difference between Dallas and other escapees is that he rides a horse and the others drive a car."

But at the Paradise Hill Bar, Bartender Larry Asey declared, "He's got a damn lot of friends up here." Some of those supporters apparently were calling the sheriff's office with phony tips about seeing Dallas everywhere from Canada to Colorado. The calls fooled no one as the pursuers prepared for a long, dangerous hunt in the sparsely populated region, where there are countless places to hide and plenty of folks willing to harbor a fugitive, even if he is actually as mean and brutal as most of the Old West's false heroes.